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The view from the drain

I was late to arrive in the US. Otherwise, I might have seen the programme myself. It was put up by an international network on the world circuit towards the end of March. It must have been really horrible because Indians settled abroad still discuss it.

The programme, I believe, showed India in poor light. This does not come as a surprise. The West has not outgrown the stereotyped image with which it has lived for years. The very word India conjures up for them a land of snakes, sanyasis or savages.

That the TV programme looked through our dirty drains does not shock me. One Britisher, Miss Mayo, did so before Independence even to the exasperation of the normally forgiving Mahatma. Many others have followed her approach off and on.

The American programme showed how in certain parts of India scavengers still carry night soil on their head. People were also seen drinking water mixed with sewage. This is no exaggeration. Nor does the programme lie when it highlights the stratification of our caste system. These are pockmarks on the face of our society. There are some other aspects that should make us still more alarmed.

But then they alone do not constitute India. If one were to describe only the squalor, the unpainted frame dwellings huddled along narrow, hole-filled streets in the Negro sections of cities and conclude that that is America, it would be incorrect and unfair. India has more points of humiliation to hide than America. But the latter has more to explain because it is a developed country.

Living conditions in most of our urban areas are such that after a visit to any of them, you do not feel like having your meal. This is a sad comment on our progress. Rulers, bureaucrats and all those who got the opportunity to tackle the problems of backwardness have failed us miserably.

It was not just a question of changing attitudes, but of building the country. Maybe the funds available were limited. But even what was allocated was not converted into education, health or shelter. Studies show that 85 per cent of the money spent lined the pockets of middlemen. The poor have been left high and dry. By any yardstick, our failures are many, our achievements only a few.

But can the West, particularly Great Britain, say with a clear conscience that part of the guilt does not come to it? To say that India was exploited would be an understatement. India was sucked dry. In one year after Independence, we opened more schools than the British did in their entire 150-year rule. Artefacts relating to our history and culture are still stacked in the basement of the Victoria & Albert Museum. The UK refuses to part with them.

Foreign exploitation touched the lower strata the most. In the British scheme of things, the common man in India did not matter. They cultivated the elite and ruled happily ever after. No wonder the Raj continues to live in clubs, cantonments and cemeteries -- even cafeterias.

Today, in the name of economic reform, the same macabre drama is being enacted. It is the same West -- this time America is in the lead -- which is coming back and edging out our labour-intensive methods and traditional tools. The ways that gave the lower half its food are shrinking day by day.

Liberalisation should have done away with red tape and protective policies. But according to a recent survey, nearly 90 procedures, spread over 35 offices, have to be gone through before the transfer of property. A legal hitch can delay the transfer by another 10 years.

There is no change in the ways of the bureaucracy. Liberalisation, instead, has destroyed the small units. Before they were forced out of business, they earned a total of Rs40 billion and employed some 300,000 people. The philosophy of self-sufficiency with tears has been replaced by exploitation without consideration. It looks as if the East India Company is back in business.

The West is also using us as a dumping ground to dispose of its overproduction. Medicines that have been found injurious to health in America or the UK are diverted to India. And the biggest multinationals, which dare not pollute the environment in their own country, are hardly bothered about health hazards to people in India. A few multinationals, running industries in the South, discharge poisonous waste in our rivers and seas with immunity.

Tomorrow, when disease stalks these areas, some other TV company will come to prepare a programme to show the stunted growth of children. It will be inspecting the drains once again and heaping the blame on 'dirty' Indians.

What the West has not understood about India, or for that matter the subcontinent, even today is that here people look with more pride at the tall steeple of a temple or a church or the minarets of a mosque than at the chimney of a factory. Materialism has not dazzled them. Industrial complexes, science laboratories and software plants -- the symbols of modernisation -- are emerging all over. But they are only a few odd dots on the serene countryside that constitutes two-thirds of India. More familiar is the sight of village women carrying water pitchers on their heads and oxen ploughing the over-cultivated land driven by their half-clad masters.

This way of life provides the people with only a meagre living. But it has a gentle persistence that gives them a sense of acceptance rather than defiance. What is happening in the industrially advanced countries has little bearing on a person of this region. He has seen them effecting changes through force, violence and war. He does not believe that imposition lasts. The moral aspect of development, understood as voluntary participation, is central to his thought and action. He has been taught that wrong means will not lead to right ends.

Mahatma Gandhi, who liberated India 51 years ago, came to the scene only in the early part of the 20th century. But non-violence and the commitment to moral and spiritual values have been rooted in India's ethos for centuries. The real problem that the region faces is that while the benefits of liberalisation have not come, its ruinous effects have, in the shape of Western culture and consumerism.

The Congress is most to blame. It inherited the administration but mismanaged it. More than that, those who participated in the struggle for independence exacted a price for their sufferings and sacrifices. Here were the very people who preserved our values trampling upon them. All that is left are greed and graft.

Our value system is crumbling. Consumerism or commercialisation is only part of the problem. The bigger part is that people themselves are becoming less aware of what is right. They do not have the desire to act according to what is right. For most, the dividing line between right and wrong, moral and immoral, has ceased to exist. How to redraw the line is the real challenge.

Kuldip Nayar